Neural Correlates of Perceived Confidence in a Partial Report Paradigm

Abstract

Confidence judgments are often severely distorted: People may feel underconfident when responding correctly or, conversely, overconfident in erred responses. Our aim here was to identify the timing of brain processes that lead to variations in objective performance and subjective judgments of confidence. We capitalized on the Partial Report Paradigm [Sperling, G. The information available in brief visual presentations. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 74, 1, 1960], which allowed us to separate experimentally the moment of encoding of information from that of its retrieval [Zylberberg, A., Dehaene, S., Mindlin, G. B., & Sigman, M. Neurophysiological bases of exponential sensory decay and top-down memory retrieval: A model. Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, 3, 2009]. We observed that the level of subjective confidence is indexed by two very specific evoked potentials at latencies of about 400 and 600 msec during the retrieval stage and by a stationary measure of intensity of the alpha band during the encoding period. When factoring out the effect of confidence, objective performance shows a weak effect during the encoding and retrieval periods. These results have relevant implications for theories of decision-making and confidence, suggesting that confidence is not constructed online as evidence is accumulated toward a decision. Instead, confidence attributions are more consistent with a retrospective mechanism that monitors the entire decision process.

But I Was So Sure! Metacognitive Judgments Are Less Accurate Given Prospectively than Retrospectively

“…In our opinion, the results add to the body of evidence from neurophysiological and behavioral experiments, as well as from modeling, suggesting that metacognitive judgments could be based on evidence unavailable to a type 1 response (Petrusic and Baranski, 2003 ; Ploran et al, 2007 ; Resulaj et al, 2009 ; Hilgenstock et al, 2014 ; Graziano et al, 2015 ). Moreover, the results suggest that response-related information could be integrated into metacognitive judgment.…”

Motor Responses Influence Perceptual Awareness Judgements

“…However, there is also some data suggesting that confidence in perceptual decisions might be formed at the late stage of decision-making process and be based on the evidence not available at the time of stimulus-related decision (Fleming, Maniscalco, Ko, Amendi, Ro, & Lau, 2015;Graziano, Parra & Sigman, 2015). Wierzchoń and colleagues (Wierzchoń, Paulewicz, Asanowicz, Timmermans & Cleeremans, 2014) tested the hypothesis that completing stimulus-related task influences metacognitive awareness measured as the relation between task accuracy and awareness ratings.…”

The Berlin Brain-Computer Interface: Progress Beyond Communication and Control

“…We hope that this focused view on our own work will nevertheless be of use to the interested reader and still provide a broad account of the developments of BCI-enhanced neurotechnology. We leave aside a wide range of other relevant research, though it is no less important, pointing here exemplarily just at a few: One potentially interesting aspect for enhancing human-computer interaction is the possibility of predicting the subject confidence of participants (Graziano et al, 2015). Research on memory encoding processes is converging toward the feasibility of predicting the success of memorization by observing brain signals before and/or during encoding (Noh et al, 2014; Cohen et al, 2015).…”